New lesson for the Huntsville city school board

It often makes sense to use a temporary job service to provide someone to fill in for an absent employee for a few weeks or longer.

But the decision by Huntsville schools Superintendent Ann Roy Moore to use temps as more or less permanent employees is questionable, particularly so because board members only recently found out about it.

The practice of using Onin Group to hire and supervise people who work in city schools came to light during the board's recent annual budget hearing for fiscal 2011.

In a Watchdog story Thursday, Times staff writer Challen Stephens reported that the school system spent about $4 million with Onin during the first eight months of this fiscal year to provide custodians, secretaries and aides for special needs students and others.

Moore says this allows the system to avoid adding permanent jobs and "the risk of having someone who gets tenure." Moore also says the ability to cut staff without the entanglement of tenure is important when the money for a job runs out, as in the case of federal stimulus money.

Like teachers, school support employees in Alabama win job protection after three years of satisfactory work. Of course, the school system isn't compelled to keep a support worker or teacher who hasn't gained tenure.

Firing a tenured employee can indeed be a lengthy and expensive process. But as board member Jennie Robinson suggests, the system has no business granting tenure to a problem worker. And what does it say when a public official embraces a strategy designed to evade a state law?

The system saves money even though it pays Onin a 31 percent markup on employee wages, but it doesn't save a lot of money. That's local money that would have provided benefits to local residents in instead of being sent to Onin's headquarters in Birmingham.

According to Herbert Wheeler, the system's finance director, the practice has saved about $100,000 this fiscal year, which will end Sept. 30. This is largely because city schools didn't have to provide benefits to any of more than 100 temporary workers.

The overall savings is an unimpressive 2.5 percent on $4 million. Still, even that is nothing to dismiss lightly when city schools have lost $22 million over two fiscal years because of state budget cuts.

Board President Doug Martinson questions whether Moore's approach is sound. "If we're spending $4 million just to avoid somebody getting tenure and we need them anyway, that doesn't seem like a good use of money."

Moore apparently proceeded without telling board members she was extending the use of temporary employees, why she was doing that and under what circumstances.

But she didn't and that was a mistake.

By Mike Hollis, for the editorial board. E-mail: mike.hollis@htimes.com